1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic facsimile-receiving-sheet recognizing apparatus for an automatic order receiving and sales control system by utilizing facsimile machines capable of automating an operation of receiving an order from an orderer, for example, between ordinary homes and a supermarket, between retail stores and wholesale store, between wholesale stores and a manufacturer, or between ordinary homes and a mail-order firm, in order to automate and rationalize the overall sales operation by utilizing information between the same and realizing a service system such that a customer is able to purchase commodities of a supermarket although the customer is at home.
2. Related Art
Hitherto, an ordinary system of the type described above has been constituted in such a manner that a telephone or a mail service is utilized or a customer goes shopping to a shop. Even if the facsimile machine is utilized, the object of it is to short the time taken to complete the shopping process in such a manner that an order slip is, as an alternative to the mail, transmitted by the facsimile machine.
In a case of an institutional system, although there are a certain number of automated order giving and receiving systems constituted by means of an on-line communication system arranged between exclusive terminals disposed at the orderers and a central computer of the order receiver, the automated order receiving operation system has not been widely used as yet.
On the other hand, the major portion of the conventional automatically recognizing apparatus uses an OCR (Optical Character Reader). If cutting or recognition of information cannot be performed, the subject portion is displayed on a display monitor so as to be supplied with information or corrected by an operation performed by an operator. Therefore, if hand-written characters written by many and unspecified persons must be recognized, many portions may be possibly recognized. As a result, the labor for the operator cannot be reduced.
In the above-described case of the on-line system established between the exclusive terminals and the center computer, the terminals must be disposed to the orderer which are the customers. Therefore, it cannot be easily established in a case where the customers are many and unspecified ordinary homes. Even if personal computers which have been widely used are, as an alternative to the exclusive terminals, employed to establish a communication with the computer of the order receiver, the manipulatability of the personal computer and the method of inputting the commodities to be ordered are complicated and troublesome. Therefore, it cannot be easily widely used by ordinary persons.
Furthermore, if the order receipt slip is erroneously recognized, the transfer of the commodity and money are affected to a degree which cannot be easily modified. Therefore, the automatic and unmanned system for recognizing the image formed by the hand-written characters and received by the facsimile machine encounters problems of unsatisfactory accuracy and long process time even if the accuracy of the OCR can be improved.